Collected Poems 1931-74 (10 page)

To be a king of islands,

Share a boundary with eagles,

Be a subject of sails.

Here, on these white rocks,

In cold palaces all winter,

Under the salt blanket,

Forget not yet the tried intent,

Pale hands before the face: face

Before the sea's blue negative,

Washing against the night,

Pushing against the doors,

Earth's dark metaphors.

Here alone in a stone city

I sing the rock, the sea-squill,

Over Greece the one punctual star.

To be king of the clock—

I know, I know—to share

Boundaries with the bird,

With the ant her lodge:

But they betray, betray.

To be the owner of stones,

To be a king of islands,

Share a bed with a star,

Be a subject of sails.

1943/
1
943

The Good Lord Nelson had a swollen gland,

Little of the scripture did he understand

Till a woman led him to the promised land

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Adam and Evil and a bushel of figs

Meant nothing to Nelson who was keeping pigs,

Till a woman showed him the various rigs

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

His heart was softer than a new laid egg,

Too poor for loving and ashamed to beg,

Till Nelson was taken by the Dancing Leg

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Now he up and did up his little tin trunk

And he took to the ocean on his English junk,

Turning like the hour-glass in his lonely bunk

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

The Frenchman saw him a-coming there

With the one-piece eye and the valentine hair,

With the safety-pin sleeve and occupied air

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Now you all remember the message he sent

As an answer to Hamilton's discontent—

There were questions asked about it in Parliament

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Now the blacker the berry, the thicker comes the juice.

Think of Good Lord Nelson and avoid self-abuse,

For the empty sleeve was no mere excuse

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

‘England Expects' was the motto he gave

When he thought of little Emma out on Biscay's wave,

And remembered working on her like a galley-slave

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

The first Great Lord in our English land

To honour the Freudian command,

For a cast in the bush is worth two in the hand

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Now the Frenchman shot him there as he stood

In the rage of battle in a silk-lined hood

And he heard the whistle of his own hot blood

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air

Nelson stylites in Trafalgar Square

Reminds the British what once they were

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

If they'd treat their women in the Nelson way

There'd be fewer frigid husbands every day

And many more heroes on the Bay of Biscay

      Aboard the Victory, Victory O.

1943/
1
943

A Coptic deputation, going to Ethiopia,

Disappeared up one morning like the ghost in Aubrey

‘With a Sweet Odour and a Melodious Twang'.

Who saw them go with their Melodious Odour?

I, said the arrow, the aboriginal arrow,

I saw them go, Coptic and Mellifluous,

Fuzzy-wig, kink-haired, with cocoa-butter shining,

With stoles on poles, sackbuts and silver salvers

Walking the desert ways howling and shining:

A Coptic congregation, red blue and yellow,

With Saints on parchment and stove-pipe hats,

All disappeared up like the ghost in Aubrey

Leaving only a smell of cooking and singing,

Rancid goat-butter and the piss of cats.

1946/
1943

All my favourite characters have been

Out of all pattern and proportion:

Some living in villas by railways,

Some like Katsimbalis heard but seldom seen,

And others in banks whose sunless hands

Moved like great rats on ledgers.

Tibble, Gondril, Purvis, the Duke of Puke,

Shatterblossom and Dude Bowdler

Who swelled up in Jaffa and became a tree:

Hollis who had wives killed under him like horses

And that man of destiny,

Ramon de Something who gave lectures

From an elephant, founded a society

To protect the inanimate against cruelty.

He gave asylum to aged chairs in his home,

Lampposts and crockery, everything that

Seemed to him suffering he took in

Without mockery.

The poetry was in the pity. No judgement

Disturbs people like these in their frames

O men of the Marmion class, sons of the free.

1946/
1943

Unrevisited perhaps forever

Southward from the capes of smoke

Where past and present to the waters are one

And the peninsula's end points out

Three fingers down the night:

On a corridor of darkness a beam

To where the islands, at last, the islands …

Abstract and more lovely

Andros Delos and Santorin,

Transpontine headlands in crisp weather,

Cries amputated by the gulls,

Formless, yet made in marble

Whose calm insoluble statues wear

Stone vines for hair, forever sharing

A sea-penumbra, the darkened arc

Where mythology walks in a wave

And the islands are.

Leaving you, hills, we were unaware

Or only as sleepwalkers are aware

Of a key turned in the heart, a letter

Posted under the door of an empty house;

Now Matapan and her forebodings

Became an identity, a trial of conduct,

Rolled and unrolled by the surges

Like a chart, mapped by a star,

With thistle and trefoil blowing,

An end of everything known

A beginning of water.

    
Here
sorrow
and
beauty
shared

    
Like
time
and
place
an
eternal
relation,

    
Matapan
…

    
Here
we
learned
that
the
lover

    
Is
contained
by
love,
not
containing,

    
Matapan, Matapan:

Here the lucky in summer

Tied up their boats; a mile from land

The cicada's small machine came like a breath;

Touching bottom saw their feet become

Webbed and monstrous on the sandy floors.

Here wind emptied the snowy caves: the brown

Hands about the tiller unbuckled.

Day lay like a mirror in the sun's eye.

Olives sleeping, rocks hanging, sea shining

And under Arbutus the scriptural music

Of a pipe beside a boy beside a bay

Soliloquised in seven liquid quibbles.

Here the lucky in summer

Made fast like islanders

And saw upon the waters, leaning down

The haunted eyes in faces torn from books:

So painted the two dark-blue Aegean eyes

And
θɛòς δíĸaιoς
‘God the Just'

Under them upon the rotting prows.

Inhabitants of reflection going:

We saw the dog-rose abloom in bowls,

Faces of wishing children in the wells

Under the Acropolis the timeless urchin

Carrying the wooden swallow,

Teller of the spring; on the hills of hair

Over Athens saw the night exhaling.

Later in islands, awaiting passage,

By waters like skin and promontories,

Were blessed by the rotation

Of peach-wind, melon-wind,

Fig-wind and wind of lemons;

Every fruit in the rotation of its breath.

And in the hills encountered

Sagacious and venerable faces

Like horn spoons: forms of address:

Christian names, politeness to strangers.

    
Heard
the
ant's
pastoral
reflections:

    
‘Here
I
go
in
Arcadia,
one
two

    
Saffron,
sage,
bergamot,
rue,

    
A
root,
a
hair,
a
bead
—
all
warm.

    
A
human
finger
swarming

    
With
little
currents:
a
ring:

    
A
married
man.
'

In a late winter of mist and pelicans

Saw the thread run out at last; the man

Kiss his wife and child good-bye

Under the olive-press, turning on a heel.

To enter April like swimmer,

And memory opened in him like a vein,

Pushed clear on the tides a pathless keel.

Standing alone on the hills

Saw all Greece, the human

Body of this sky suspending a world

Within a crystal turning,

Guarded by the green wicks of cypresses.

Far out on the blue

Like notes of music on a page

The two heads: the man and his wife.

They are always there.

It is too far to hear the singing.

1943/
1943

Nothing is lost, sweet self,

Nothing is ever lost.

The unspoken word

Is not exhausted but can be heard.

Music that stains

The silence remains

O echo is everywhere, the unbeckonable bird!

1956/
1943

This unimportant morning

Something goes singing where

The capes turn over on their sides

And the warm Adriatic rides

Her blue and sun washing

At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.

Day rings in the higher airs

Pure with cicadas, and slowing

Like a pulse to smoke from farms,

Extinguished in the exhausted earth,

Unclenching like a fist and going.

Trees fume, cool, pour—and overflowing

Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake

Carpets from windows, brush with dew

The up-and-doing: and young lovers now

Their little resurrections make.

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep

Stitched up—and wake, my darling, wake.

The impatient Boatman has been waiting

Under the house, his long oars folded up

Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

1946/
1944

The trees have been rapping

At these empty casements for a year,

Have been rapping and tapping and

Repeating to us here

Omens of the defeating wind,

Omens of the defeating mind.

Headquarters of a war

House in a fever-swamp

Headquarters of a mind at odds.

Before me now lies Byron and behind,

Belonging to the Gods,

Another Byron of the feeling

Shown in this barbered hairless man,

Splashed by the candle-stems

In his expensive cloak and wig

And boots upon the dirty ceiling.

Hobbled by this shadow,

My own invention of myself, I go

In wind, rain, stars, climbing

This ladder of compromises into Greece

Which like the Notself looms before

My politics, my invention and my war.

None of it but belongs

To this farded character

Whose Grecian credits are his old excuse

By freedom holding Byron in abuse.

Strange for one who was happier

Tuned to women, to seek and sift

In the heart's simple mesh,

To know so certainly

Under the perfume and the politics

What undertow of odours haunts the flesh:

Could once resume them all

In lines that gave me rest,

And watch the fat fly Death

Hunting the skeleton down in each,

Like hairs in plaster growing,

Promising under the living red the yellow—

I helped these pretty children by their sex

Discountenance the horrid fellow.

I have
been
a
secretary
(I sing)

A
secretary
to
love
…

In this bad opera landscape

Trees, fevers and quarrels

Spread like sores: while the gilded

Abstractions like our pride and honour

On this brute age close like doors

Which pushing does not budge.

Outside them, I speak for the great average.

My disobedience became

A disguise for a style in a new dress.

Item: a lock of hair.

Item: a miniature, myself aged three,

The innocent and the deformed

Pinned up in ribbons for posterity.

And now here comes

The famous disposition to weep,

To renounce. Picture to yourself

A lord who encircled his life

With women's arms; or another

Who rode through the wide world howling

And searching for his mother.

Picture to yourself a third: a cynic.

This weeping published rock—

The biscuits and the glass of soda-water:

Under Sunium's white cliffs

Where I laboured with my knife

To cut a ‘Byron' there—

I was thinking softly of my daughter.

A cock to Aesculapius no less …

You will suggest we found only

In idleness and indignation here,

Plucked by the offshore dancers, brigs

Like girls, and ports of call

In our commerce with liberty, the Whore,

Through these unbarbered priests

And garlic-eating captains:

Fame like the only porch in a wall

To squeeze our shelter from

By profit and by circumstance

Assist this rocky nation's funeral.

The humane and the lawful in whom

Art and manners mix, who sent us here,

This sort of figures from a drawing-room

Should be paused themselves once

Under these legendary islands.

A landscape hurled into the air

And fallen on itself: we should see

Where the frail spines of rivers

Soft on the backbone intersect and scribble

These unbarbered gangs of freedom dribble

Like music down a page and come

Into the valleys with their small

Ordnance which barks and jumps.

I, Byron: the soft head of my heart bumps

Inside me as on a vellum drum.

Other enemies intervene here,

Not less where the valet serves

In a muddle of papers and consequences;

Not less in places where I walk alone

With Conscience, the defective: my defences

Against a past which lies behind,

Writing and rewriting to the bone

Those famous letters in my mind.

Time grows short. Now the trees

Are rapping at the empty casements.

Fevers are closing in on us at last—

So long desired an end of service

To the flesh and its competitions of endurance.

There is so little time. Fletcher

Tidies the bed at dusk and brings me coffee.

You, the speaking and the feeling who come after:

I sent you something once—it must be

Somewhere in
Juan
—it has not reached you yet.

O watch for this remote

But very self of Byron and of me,

Blown empty on the white cliffs of the mind,

A dispossessed His Lordship writing you

A message in a bottle dropped at sea.

1946/
1944